To help solve a big data program for a new telescope that will conduct a major sky survey of the from the high desert of Chile, a scientific collaboration launched a competition to find the best way to train computers to identify the many types of objects it will be imaging.

Key components for the sky-mapping Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, weighing about 12 tons, were hoisted atop the Mayall Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Arizona, and bolted into place last week, marking a major project milestone.

André Walker-Loud, a staff scientist at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), is co-leader of a team that is among the six finalists for the Association of Computing Machinery’s Gordon Bell Prize that will be awarded this month.

How do you create the largest 3D map of the universe? It’s as easy as teaching 5,000 robots how to “dance.” DESI, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, is an experiment that will target millions of distant galaxies by automatically swiveling fiber-optic positioners (the robots) to point at them and gather their light. In creating this detailed map, scientists hope to learn more about dark energy, which is driving the accelerating expansion of the universe.

Through a new research program supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of High Energy Physics, a consortium of researchers from Berkeley Lab, UC Berkeley, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst will develop sensors that enlist the seemingly weird properties of quantum physics to probe for dark matter particles in new ways, with increased sensitivity, and in uncharted regions.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) this week announced support from the Department of Energy that significantly expands Berkeley Lab’s research efforts in quantum information science, an area of research that harnesses the phenomenon of quantum coherence, in which two or more particles are so tightly entangled that a change to one simultaneously affects the other. Quantum information science seeks to utilize this phenomenon to hold, transmit, and process information.

The largest liquid-argon neutrino detector in the world has just recorded its first particle tracks, signaling the start of a new chapter in the story of the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE). DUNE’s scientific mission is dedicated to unlocking the mysteries of neutrinos, the most abundant (and most mysterious) matter particles in the universe.

The latest edition of the Review of Particle Physics, a go-to resource for particle physicists published Aug. 17 in the American Physical Society’s Physical Review D journal, marks the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Berkeley Lab-based Particle Data Group that produces the Review.

A photo featuring a view of UC Berkeley’s landmark Campanile building, the San Francisco cityscape and bay, and the south side of the Shyh Wang Hall building at Berkeley Lab was judged as the winner in a local Physics Photowalk photo competition organized by the Lab. The photo was submitted by Michael Dawson, an amateur photographer.